Ridiculous Hangups About Self-Driving Cars

Self-driving cars are getting a lot of bad press. You may not be one of them, but I’m sure there are lots of people on this list who think that human drivers are better than a computer. Guess what? Those people are wrong.

The latest statistics emphasize that self-driving cars are already 91% safer than humans… and that will only get better over time. Assuming “safer” roughly corresponds to the number of traffic deaths, that means the number of traffic deaths would go from about 35,000 to 3,800 if self-driving cars were implemented everywhere.

I do not have a self-driving car, and I have no plans to get one—at least, not in the immediate future—but I will someday. There is so much controversy about using cameras versus LIDAR that I just don’t understand, but I do know some people with self-driving Teslas who will tell me stories about how they’ll take a three-hour trip and touch the wheel only two or three times.

Now, the fun part of reliable self-driving comes when the driver can play a game of Parcheesi while the car is doing its thing. As it stands right now, at least in Teslas, there is a camera in the car that makes sure you are paying attention to what is going on. But I can think of all kinds of things I could be doing in the back seat of a car that is driving itself. (And yes, that is the way my mind works.)

Think about some of the positive externalities of this. Ambulance calls? Slashed. Ambulance-chasing lawyers? Gone, out of business. No traffic. Cars can drive faster, with less space between vehicles on the road, which means that real estate far away from cities will become more valuable. And this is just the tip of the iceberg…

Of course, there are anti-technology politicians who are against self-driving, like Josh Hawley. If you find yourself on the same side of an issue as Josh Hawley, you should check your premises. Hawley, and others, if they succeed in blocking self-driving cars, will quite literally be responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. 

Also, why do people want to drive cars? Some people like to go for a long drive occasionally, I guess. I don’t. Driving is 100% stress and cortisol. If I drive from Pawleys Island to, say, Asheville, over the course of six hours, I am all stressed out when I get there. Think of all the things you can do with the time. You can read a book. You can work on your computer. You can knit Bernie Sanders mittens. Anything, except for staring at the road, terrified that a deer is going to jump out in front of you.

I am not the best driver in the world, but I am pretty safe. I can sometimes be a careless driver—e.g., I don’t always use the turn signal—and I have been known to swerve while I am trying to put in a ZYN. But! I have exceptional reflexes, the same reflexes that made me a champion-team handball goalie in high school and college, so I avoid a lot of accidents. In fact, I avoided an accident just recently. But crucially, I don’t want to be doing the driving! You know what has better reflexes than me? A computer. People have ridiculous hangups about this.

Anyway, this is an investing newsletter, and I’m sure you are interested in the investment implications. Tesla has self-driving cars. Google has Waymo taxis. Whichever company gets it right stands to make a great deal of money. Eventually, we will reach a tipping point—perhaps three to five years from now when people’s preconceived notions are refuted, when the data starts to make its way into the public consciousness about how much safer self-driving is. Then, everyone will want a self-driving car. The car manufacturers that don’t have them will literally cease to exist.

That is, if dumb politicians don’t get in the way… and journalists, with their superstitions. And, of course, I should mention the incident in San Francisco last week where a Waymo taxi killed a beloved neighborhood cat. As you know, I love cats, but I don’t think that cats should stand in the way of self-driving cars, especially if the cars can be taught to avoid them. By the way (and this is true), 10% of people, when they see an animal in the road, will actually swerve to hit the animal. There has been research on this, and hell is not big enough to accommodate these fiends.

Okay… there is a chance that you have made it this far and are still skeptical. Well, Elon Musk just signed a pay package that might result in him getting a trillion dollars. People still bet on that guy to fail, and I don’t get it. I am a believer in the idea that technology can be used to solve pretty much any problem in existence. Human beings are fallible, not to mention the ones that drink and drive. Imagine how much human suffering we can prevent. Imagine how much productivity we can unleash.

For my next trick, I will extol the virtues of lab-grown meat.

If you like this newsletter, do me a favor and go to my SoundCloud page. Check out my new mix, “Kiss Me.” It is sure to brighten your day.

Jared Dillian, MFA